By SEAN AXMAKER, SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, December 9, 2004

Fresh-faced Shane (Michael Legge) is a 20-year-old from the suburbs in David Gleeson's often charming and more often familiar Irish coming-of-age tale. He stepped right out of public school and into a monotonous but safe civil service job and now he's making his big move into the big city of Limerick.

He is, in the words of his hip, happening, gay fashion student roommate Vincent (Allen Leech), a square, from the top of his flat haircut to the bottom of his schoolboy wardrobe, a collection of "naf" sweaters and off-brand jeans surely picked out by his mother when he was 15.

Under that anonymous front is an artist anxious to break out and a young man who would like to get to know foxy fast-food clerk Gemma (Amy Shiels). She is worldly and just happens to be a former classmate of Vince's.

Faster than you can say "makeover," Vince gives Shane a "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" transformation. Then the friendly (if somewhat unsettling) drug dealer downstairs gives him a job as a contraband courier, for seed money for his art school dreams, or at least his future as a single guy in the big city.

The job puts Shane through a harrowing ordeal in one of the film's most startling scenes. It should be an eye-opener for him, but the easy accessibility of drugs at this stage of his metamorphosis clouds his judgment.

Legge brings a nice-guy shyness to Shane, and Leech is as likable as screen characters come. That helps overcome the garden-variety trajectory of Shane's reckless wild ride of first freedom and the painfully earnest narration that frames it.

"Have you ever felt that life was passing you by?" ponders Shane in the opening minutes. "Did you ever think something was missing?"

The film is better when it's showing rather than telling: the soul-crushing workplace that sucks the passion out of its employees, the easy rapport between straight-laced Shane and flamboyant Vince, the flavor of urban nightlife in Limerick. It makes for a modest but amiable comedy.